CROZIER, LORNA (b. 1948)

Born on May 24, 1948, and raised in Swift Current,
Saskatchewan, poet, anthologist, and
professor Lorna Crozier writes predominantly
of life on the Canadian Great Plains. Frequent
reprintings of her new and selected poems,
The Garden Going on without Us (1985), and
her characteristically packed public readings
attest to her work's broad appeal. Its humor,
rich imagery, and unpretentious language
prompt many people to recognize aspects of
their own lives. Crozier's sometimes spicy stew
of frank sexuality and trenchant but witty
feminist critique has, however, overpowered
some palettes.

The strength of Crozier's identification
with the land is evident in the title of her first
collection, Inside Is the Sky (1976), while her
kinship with its creatures, which in "Inventing
the Hawk" makes her feel the bird's scream
rising from her belly to echo in her skull, is
sometimes stronger than the connection she
feels to humans. Her affection for Prairie people
is, nevertheless, palpable in everything
from the tall tales of "Spring Storm, 1916" to
her description in "Home Town" of a freshman
history student who identifies the Holy
Land as something like Christ's hometown.
The warmth of such feelings does not, however,
blind her to the racism, misogyny, and
pettiness of some hometown people.

Crozier often reworks Christian and patriarchal
accounts of origin and existence. Her
rewriting of Genesis in "On the Seventh Day"
explains the thin strip of earth beneath the
massive skies of the Great Plains: a forgetful
God was without His wife to remind Him that
He had already created light, so He kept repeating
this step, leaving scant space for land.
A Saving Grace (1996) gives new voice and a
richer female consciousness to Sinclair Ross's
Mrs. Bentley, narrator of As for Me and My House, imagining, for example, the kind of
domestic violence that might go on in the
house of a woman who jumps into a dry well
with her baby and lies there silently for three
days ("The Kind of Woman").